International consulting company Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) will help two Tajik banks – Tojik Sodirot Bonk (TSB) and Agroinvestbonk – wriggle out of a tight financial situation. The company will work out the plan of recovery of these distressed banks.
Issues related to the current state of TSB and Agroinvestbonk were discussed at a meeting of First Deputy Head of the National Bank of Tajikistan (NBT) Jamoliddin Nouraliyev with Nikolay Kuznetsov, Head of A&M’s Moscow Branch, and Atyten Rustamova, Head of Resident Office (RO) of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in Dushanbe.
According to the NBT press service, A&M will work out the plan of recovery of TSB and Agroinvestbonk while EBRD will provide technical assistance to carry out those works. Appropriate agreements have reportedly been signed.
TSB and Agroinvestbonk last year experienced severe problems in providing account-holders with their own savings.
But then on December 21, 2016 parliament approved a government decree to issue bonds to recapitalize four distressed banks,
TSB reportedly got 2.25 billion somoni ($285 million at end of 2016 exchange rates) and Agroinvestbonk 1.7 billion somoni ($215 million).
Tajprombank was promised 450 million somoni ($56 million) and Fononbank a relatively meager 80 million somoni ($10 million).
NBT, however, announced on February 24, that it was pulling the licenses of Tajprombank and Fononbank, despite claiming it was taking exhaustive efforts to keep them going.
Customers at those banks have been paid out 17,500 somoni (around $2,000) out of the state’s Individuals Deposits Insurance Fund. Anybody with more than that amount of money in the bank is still waiting to see how much they will get in the end.
In April the government decided unilaterally to allocate $66 million it had set aside as bailout funds for Tajprombank and Fononbank to construction work on the Roghun hydropower dam. (News.tj/Business World Magazine)